A retro-gaming enthusiast revisits LucasArts' 1990s management sim Afterlife and lays out why the game still fascinates and frustrates. Framing it as "SimCity meets Heaven and Hell," the writer explains difficulty finding modern resources, digs up vintage FAQs and forum threads, and summarizes personal experiments aimed at breaking through design quirks. Nostalgic attempts included hex-editing and repeated restarts; recent playthroughs produced incremental improvements in souls collected and motivated a compact guide to the game's opaque mechanics.
The piece delivers concrete tactics and observations: disable "Bad Things" to avoid gameplay tedium despite halved soul rates; expect negative early cashflow and consider a money cheat (SHIFT-421) to get started; design Hell with long, inefficient snaky roads and Heaven with tight grid roads for adjacency bonuses. Zones emit changing "vibes" and some infrastructure yields fixed positive or negative vibes; Heaven rewards diversity while Hell rewards uniformity. Several buildings upgrade and change footprint (gates can grow from 3×3 to 4×4), tile populations increase over time, and development rules affect how 2×2 and 3×3 zones form. Recommended tactics include aiming for 3×3 Heaven clusters, isolating Hell blocks or using 2×2 strategies, and locking high-value 2×2s (locks cost ~10 pennies/year) because 3×3s seldom devolve. Personal best runs rose from 1M to 83M souls, and the writer plans further playthroughs using these lessons.
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